Enemies try to stop you from progressing, but they explode when they die, which you can instead use as an extra boost if you place yourself carefully.

At the core of the game, you do everything with your thrusters. You use the thrusters to propel you in a direction, but you also use them to deal damage to enemies, and you use them to deflect projectiles and enemies.

Get your rage high and blow up enemies that are in the way + position yourself so that explosions fling you through the level, or keep your rage low and use your nimbleness to dodge enemies and get to the goal that way instead. Or do something in between.

(I've only played the game on Windows, so please try that first if possible.)

Comments

I really like the idea behind this and the aesthetic is out of this world. The aiming feels a little clunky with a mouse, though, especially with the rough walls that you can easily get stuck on. I would like to see a more polished version of this. My only other complaint is, while I appreciate you trying to add a plot to this, the intro moves really slowly with not much going on other than the text crawl and a slow camera zoom. I don't know that it's such a great idea to have a text crawl like this for a jam where people are just trying to get into a game to try an interesting concept and get out. But, nevertheless, A for effort here.

Thanks for the feedback! That's a really good point - I didn't really have in mind that the audience here is totally in-and-out (I also tend to go a bit too much in depth when I check out other people's games, which might have had me biased even if I had considered it). I also feel when I start the game up that it's way to slow for what you expect when you open a jam game (although I do love the animation). For my post jam version I'm reconsidering the entire control scheme. It's a bit of a rabbit hole, because it will get down all the way to what the core of the game is - is it that the thrusters do multiple things, or is it the rage meter or is it both? Perhaps you'll control the player mainly through WASD/Arrow keys, with an additional mouse crosshair that instantly flips the player around to fire that way when you click? I'll have to try a bunch of different control schemes... :D Aaaanyway, thanks a lot for your encouraging words and nice feedback! I don't think I'll have time to check out any more games now as we have a new week starting tomorrow, but I'd love to check out what you've done at some point!

I think the control scheme you have here is at the core of the design philosophy for the game. Using WASD or the arrow keys might make it snappier, but you'd probably be sacrificing necessary precision. I don't know if a controller is supported because I didn't try one, but I bet that's going to be the best compromise between ability to react and accuracy. Either way, it's good that you're putting so much thought into it, because that is certainly one of the most important parts of the game.

I agree, and I'm also planning how to add controller support in a good way. Currently I'm considering one joystick being for movement and the second one to move the camera slightly farther to either side. With the WASD controls they'd really just an alternative to the mouse, since you could use either. For now the plan is to make a list of different control schemes and an easy way to switch between them in-game, so I can quickly bring new ideas to life.

Aesthetics are great. The game manages to look amazing despite everything being composed of cubes, the music fits very well to create this really chill mood. I also think it was a good idea to place HUD elements on top of the player, instead of the edges of the screen.

The mechanic of dynamic damage/speed tradeoff is really interesting and I don't believe I've encountered it before and I like how your design accommodates different playstyles.

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to master either of the playstyles, since the controls felt awkward to me (I used a mouse) and I didn't get used to them even by the time I completed the game. Additionally, sometimes when an enemy exploded the game froze up for about a second, which was disorienting and made it hard to properly take advantage of the explosions (though it might well just be that my PC is too slow). Another gripe I have is that it was frustrating to get thrown back by an explosion into the previous stage and, after resetting, still appear there instead of being returned to the latest stage (though maybe it's my just punishment for being bad at the game).

It's nice that you thought of and actually managed to implement a proper intro and an outro for a jam game and I liked how both are delivered.

Overall, I must say your game is a highlight of this jam for me. Extremely well done, especially considering you essentially did it alone.

Oh wow, what a review! Thank you so much for putting all of that effort in! I'll be sure to try your game tomorrow and give it a really proper review too.

For the aesthetics, I actually started out making a couple of different generations of sprites and it just looked like the worst thing you can imagine. After trying to rework it a bunch of times I experimented a little bit with making honeycomb patterns, which just gave me the idea of using actual 3D cubes in Unity to make my them come alive, which also meant I didn't need to try using Blender again (there not many programs I just don't get, but that's one of them), and it became this kind of pixel-art style but using 3D cubes, which I agree just worked so well, so that was a lucky one! I had already spent way too much time on it, and it was millimeters away from ending up just a green mess because I had to move on and make the actual game. And the HUD placement actually came out of the controls, because I tried to make it control with the absolute position of the mouse at first, but then changed it to relative, so the cursor just had to follow player around, and I also think it totally worked - it would have felt very strange do something else, but I might have if I didn't start with the cursor.

I'm happy you also notice the rage mechanics, because I was worried they wouldn't really come across at all. I wish I would have had more time to put into the level design, and also that I was much better it to really give you the opportunities to do all the cool moves that should be possible. But I think the reason you didn't really get a feel for it is completely my fault. I've been thinking more about the controls, and I think what would probably make the most sense would be to use the thumbstick on a controller to control the player (and maybe the second thumbstick to control the camera). And, since I went a bit all-in on the effects, I even get the occasional lag spikes on my i7 6770k, GTX 1080 rig...! There just wasn't time to do anything about it. The explosions shouldn't be able to send you back into a previous section though, since the doors are already closed (unless you had used the reset button (space bar) - that one also resets the doors!). In future versions I'll make sure that won't happen for any reason though. If the game is not fun then it's my fault and I want to fix it! :)

You know, I figured an intro is more fun than a menu, and it takes like 45 minutes to implement it with a simple animation (you can make so many quick and dirty things like that using the animation tool in Unity, it's great! Just copy the world, remove all components from the player and other stuff you want to animate, and the just drag stuff around with recording on).

Thank you so much for this huge effort you put into both trying and analyzing my game, and also for taking the time to communicate it all to me. Expect one in return tomorrow!

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, on the game page it mentions that it's very much intended to be played with a physical mouse, a touch pad becomes severely crippling. If you'd get a chance to have a look at it with another mouse I'd love it if you could compare your experiences :)

Enjoyed playing this game. One gripe I had, was the the camera would lag behind the "destroyer" when going fast, instead of staying centered on it. Since the camera position influences where the mouse has to be in order to aim the thrusters correctly this had an even bigger impact than just "I can't see where I am going".

My submission for the jam, used similiar mechanics and I was worried about making the game fast and the levels big so I sticked to a one screen survival bullet hell kinda deal. In turn my game feels quite sluggish. It was fun to see a well done, big and fast version of this mechanic, after I disregarded those traits during conception phase.

Thanks! The camera position actually does not influence the thruster aim - it's based only on relative mouse movement (the little white crosshair inside the circle surrounding the destroyer shows where your mouse is). But yes, I totally agree that the camera should be more zoomed out/faster! The game is set up with 4 different orthographic cameras that I've balanced against each other, so towards the end when the game was playable and I started realizing that the camera needed work, I just left it and focused on what I hadn't created yet. But it sounds like I need to fine tune the camera and the controls. Thank you for the feedback! I'll check out your game now. :)

A very pretty game~ A little TOO abstract, maybe; took me quite some time to figure out what to do and where to go. The mechanics were a little vague, too, but I understood one thing: boost to the end. All in all, not a bad game at all~

Thanks for the comment! What I would have loved for to come across more in the level design is that you can use different strategies to boost yourself to the end. Get your rage high and blow up enemies that are in the way + position yourself so that explosions fling you through the level, or keep your rage low and use your nimbleness (is that a word?) to dodge enemies and get to the goal that way instead. Or a combination of the two. But something like that :)

At some point each section felt a little too big with many things in it that I simply avoided and didn't care about. I feel like the start is better because it's more focused. I also got some lag spikes at some point, but it's a minor issue.

It has a great sound design, graphical design, it fits the theme and has clever counterbalancing in it's mechanics. My only complaint is that the jagged wall make you stuck when you want to operate quickly.